5 reasons why americans hate soccer

First of all it’s called football and not soccer. When you use feet and the ball it’s called football unlike american football which uses hands and the ball is egg shaped. So it should be called “Hand Eggball”. Anyone? May be I should pitch it to NFL!. OK, let me get to the point and give you 5 (sarcastic) reasons why Americans hate soccer.

1) Players go down easily: Ok folks, this is a legitimate one. But this is more tactical than anything. In american games, they have a secret tactic called “timeout” to halt the opponents run or if players run out of gas and need a breath of fresh air, they call timeouts. And keep in mind the frequent in-game substitutions in Basketball, Hand Eggball, College games, Baseball, NHL etc. These legal loopholes prevent an opponent with slight disadvantage during the game not to feign injuries like in football to get an artificial timeout. Yeah, I know its bad when players go down even with slight contact looking for penalty or cheap booking. This is a concern and I hate this as well. But don’t fault the game for it.

Football player getting injured with the slightest contact – I hate it as well.

2) No Razmataz: In football, the game starts and runs for 45 minutes straight before any commercial, then a 15 min half time and then another 45 minutes of the game. So the game doesn’t drag for more than 2 hours give or take. (Penalties and extra times are different).

But Americans want Commercials, Kiss-cams, Dance-cams, TV Timeouts, T-shirt cannon girls to shoot t-shirts into the crowd, Mascots doing push ups, Trivia in the middle of the game, cheerleaders etc. These are what I call masala in american sports. Seriously, this will not fly well in Europe or rest of the world :p.

Cheerleaders and T-shirt cannon girls – I call all this masala.

3) Ties in Games: Yeah, I know how frustrating it is to see a game for 90 minutes and not knowing who wins or the fact that some games even end with nil-nil scoreline. But understand this, regular season games are 90 minutes with only 3 substitutions and 30 minutes extra time will take a lot of toll on the players who have already played this far and the frequency at which they play, it makes sense to stop the game at 90 min. For tournaments they have extra time and PK’s.

nil nil scorecard

4) Word Championship: In football, there is only one world cup and it happens once every 4 years where over 100 countries try to qualify for the tournament. People in america want to see world cup every year. But in America, New York beats Massachusetts in NFL and call themselves “World Champions”. Same with Missouri beating Texas in baseball calling themselves “World Champions”. I don’t know how in the world you can do that. That is just being too arrogant.

So New York beats New England and therefore NY is the World Champions? – What a joke!

5) Everything is opposite: Game clock does not have a countdown, instead it start with 0 and goes to 45 Minutes and half ends. Americans like countdown. Also, home team is the always first in scorecard. Arsenal Vs Manchester united means Arsenal is the home team and its opposite in all american sports. You can’t be mad at this as America decided to do everything opposite to what the rest of the world follows including following the brilliant “Imperial System” which does not make any sense.

Bonus one – No superlatives in football championships: Americans love to have superlatives in front of the tournament like Superbowl, Elite Eight, Final Four, Super Cup, Frozen Four etc. If only football had “Super Awesome English Supreme Premier League“, then americans might be interested.

Bottom line is each sport is different, rules are different, players are built differently and Americans have to respect sports/players from other countries and stop mocking them and the same goes to the rest of the world who think NFL players are just meatheads with pads wrestling in the middle of the field. There is a lot of strategy involved. Whatever the game may be, the players give 100% and all they want to do is win and nothing else. Doesn’t matter if this is chess, billiards, bowling, racing, football or basketball. The all have only one goal and lets respect these people and their professions.

hes only right on #1 everything else is a more than a reach and a huge fail attempt at trying to justify why americans think this sport is incredibly boring… this coming from a country that loves baseball which is like watch a two snails dry hump.

Good point Rakesh I am not much of a soccer game watcher, but I tend to watch a few games here and there it sometimes feels like a bore but after reading this I have understood more clearly the depth of soccer and it seems very true so thank you.